Good textbook for Mandarin (Language Programs, Books & Tapes) Language Learning Forum

Good textbook for Mandarin
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Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes

12 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

learnvietnamese
Diglot
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Singapore
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Speaks: Vietnamese*, English^C2
Studies: French, Mandarin

Message 9 of 12

20 September 2011 at 4:39pm | IP Logged

I think the FSI for Mandarin is good.

I'm planning to try the Assimil Chinese.
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Homogenik
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Canada
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Studies: Polish, Mandarin

Message 10 of 12

20 September 2011 at 8:31pm | IP Logged

I'm trying something rather obscure and it's in french (the instructions are), except for volume 2, then I think it's
mostly in chinese. It's a series called Le chinois aujourd'hui by Hongju Yu (on http://www.zone.coop),
features a volume 1 and a volume 2 (with CDS) plus an exercise book for learning the characters. What attracted
me to this series is that it's used in university classes here to teach mandarin to french speakers and it's been
used for many many years (it's based on Manuel de chinois pratique I, Beijing, Shangwu, 1984). The recording of
the cd is kind of crappy though (poor audio quality), but I got the Assimil audio cds on my computer from the
local library to help me with pronunciation. I don't know yet if it's a good method since I'm only beginning.

Also, I was looking around for a good chinese dictionary, french or English. For french, it's rather poor (Larousse
doesn't yet have a single dictionary with both chinese-french, french-chinese). In English, I found this on amazon
and it looks amazing : http://www.amazon.ca/Oxford-Chinese-Desk-Dictionary-English-
Chinese/dp/0198005962/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1316541777&sr=8 -8
Does anyone have a suggestion for a dictionary?
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3Dfan
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United States
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Message 11 of 12

01 October 2011 at 9:26pm | IP Logged

newyorkeric wrote:

I'm using the old Colloquial Chinese course by Pollard and T'ung. I really love this book. The dialogs are really well put together and actually much funnier than Assimil. There are more explicit grammar notes and there are a lot of practice sentences based on the grammar notes that are really useful. To top it all off, there are 5 hours of freely available audio for the book here, all in Chinese. The voices are really nice to listen to also and the acting is super. So overall this is the book I would recommend for beginners. It's all in pinyin, which is a plus of you are learning characters separately. There are character versions available, too, in simplified and traditional.

Is that the audio from the publisher's now unavailable cassette tapes?
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newyorkeric
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Message 12 of 12

02 October 2011 at 3:16am | IP Logged

3Dfan wrote:

Is that the audio from the publisher's now unavailable cassette tapes?

I don't think it is, but I'm not sure. There was only one cassette tape but this audio is over 5 hours long.

Edited by newyorkeric on 02 October 2011 at 6:58am

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